Shipbucket

Part of revision process.



Any comments welcome.

From 1898 Mister McKinley's Army to 1930 Mister Hoover's Army the big change is motorization, the addition of specialist troops, and addition of semi-auto rifles and light machine guns.

Work in progress.

FLUFF: MISTER HOOVER'S ARMY

Well, it is not much of an army in 1931 in the AU as in the RTL. There is this little thing called a Depression. No counter-history gedanken experiment will be able to avoid the farming base collapse brought on by mechanization, the wide use of cheap fertilizers, crop overproduction, and WW I price controls, all instituted or exacerbated by Mister Wilson and his incompetent administration's misjudgment, mismanagement and criminal neglect to do the proper market analysis of a postwar world economy. The farming collapse has exactly the opposite effect that Wilson's economists thought falling farm prices would have. Instead of anticipating of what farm foreclosures on two million farms would do to the banks who had nothing but unworked land and no fungible capital to speak of would do once World War I inflated food prices fall, the economic geniuses assume that even if there was a postwar bank panic (as the Civil War produced in 1878), an expanding economy would eventually take up the slack. Economic science (Maynard Keynes) is a joke in 1920.

Add to the farm base problem the little one about 4 million unhappy unmarketable unskilled veterans, males all, who are dumped on a semi-skilled labor-saturated economy. In the history of the roaring twenties with the margin purchase stocks and undercapitalized financial transactions going through on "paper credit" (Ponzi schemes financing at 2% of demand value to meet the war demand), and over investment in production (the war again you know? All those factories built in 1916-1918, and then 1919, the cancelled contracts?). The republicans who come in after Mister Wilson, kick the economic dsaster down the timeline for eight years, but the notes come due. And there are those unemployable veterans reading about it in the [discarded] newspapers they pick up out of the trash of the time, the newspapers who fail to report on the real unemployment crisis as they glorify the stock market and occasionally report the economic rumblings going on 1920-1927 in the news overseas and the foreclosed family farm at home.

The US government from 1921-1928 hopes that German reparations will keep the Europeans solvent so they can repay American loans. (European defaults will be a catastrophe, that kicks the third leg out from under the stool that floats America's paper money economy.). The Europeans assume that German reparations will keep American banks off their necks. It is the financial version of the circular firing squad. Of course the German government cannot. They adopt currency inflation as a way to cheat their way out of it, but it gets away from them (That is the flaw in Keynesian economics, something has to have fungible concrete value for an economy to work. Today that is fuel {oil}. Think about what happens when that goes TUGATS.), as they have nothing to back the worthless paper they print. No goods, no services and 6 million unemployed and unemployable military veterans.

Anyway when the house of faith collapses and the money in Germany and the stocks in America go to zero purchase power, the respective governments; Herman Muller's and Herbert Hoover's face near identical crisis. In Hoover's case he turns to public works and limited deficit spending as he underestimates the calamity. Germany, already had its Munich Putsch in 1923, has under Gustav Stressmann (mid 1920s) undertakes currency reform and bamboozles the Allies (Lacarno Treaty), over reparations and the Ruhr and is effectively a police state by the time Muller takes the chancellorship. The cops are still out there busting heads with gusto in 1928. Muller is thus able to carry out further reforms behind the polizei wall and a very shaky political coalition to institute wider unemployment insurance, a modest public works program and even rearmament. What scuttles him is a life shortening illness, his own stupid (yes I wrote stupid, because they would not compromise with the centrists on the Ruhr strike or the tax reforms or industrial rationalization policies the Muller government and the center wanted. German goods {exports} would have underwritten the Mark in both schemes.), and the polizei's refusal to bust Nazi heads as enthusiastically as they are stomping communists. How does one think Germany turns hard right in 1931?

Hoover's crisis is THE BONUS ARMY.

Howso? They are just WW I veterans who demand what Congress mandate that they be paid in 1945 for their war service. The hobos show up in 1932 and want their money now. It is the Depression and many of these unfortunate men are unemployable and unwanted. (Look at the Middle East for what this means economically. Terrorism has an economic cause.). Agitators are at work among them. (Think Occupy Wall Street; only 1000 times worse.). Hoover has been to Europe. He also has good diplomats, who report on France, Germany, Italy and Britain. So he has a good idea of how things go globally in Europe. The "Reds" are spreading like a plague among the underclass unemployables and the feckless intelligentsias. And Hoover lumps the fascists with the "Reds" as part of the problem. Being an engineer, Hoover sees no functional difference among the flavors of totalitarian extremists. This "bonus army", to Hoover, looks like the nucleus of an American "brown shirt" movement. That is important. In Germany, (and Italy) the fascists recruit from the military unemployables and the COPS. That is what American diplomats report to Hoover.

So Hoover does not turn to his own police. (He has no national police, with good Founding Fathers constitutional reasons.) But he has a federal army with a long tradition of enforcing public order in time of emergency. (Reconstruction South and the Old West territories. Who was the law? Not the vigilantes or the town marshals. Ever hear of the Lincoln County War? That was General Lew Wallace (New Mexico territory governor) who sics Pat Garrett on Billy the Kid and uses the US cavalry to pacify Lincoln County in the meantime.).

The Bonus Army gets the taste of bayonets and tanks. Douglas Macarthur leads that charge. He cannot do that thing if Hoover does not tell the secretary of war and the secretary tells the army chief of staff to break the hobo villages. Nothing on paper, of course, so Hoover can later deny he ever tells anyone anything and thus escapes blame. (He actually does not as this fiasco is tied to him during the election.) The secretary of war, Patrick Hurly, also denies he ever tells Macarthur to make a full scale assault of it, but one gets the feeling...

That is done with infantry and cavalry supported by tanks and is virtually the WW I era US Army equipment wise. Note how this applies today?^1 and ^2

^1 Balko, Radley. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. Public Affairs, 2013

^2 Will the Growing Militarization of Our Police Doom Community Policing?

Anyway, the logistics of this farce that Macarthur somehow bungles as both a riot control exercise and public relations fiasco does not go unnoticed by foreign observers: especially the British, Germans, Russians, and the Japanese army attaches in Washington DC. Their national governments' leaderships will remember their reports and form attitudes about the American war machine's quality on this RTL example basis clear into 1943. They will be right. (Kasserine Pass. Buna and Gota, New Guinea reinforce the impressions.). It is not much of an army, they think.

Even if the experimental motor regiment is allowed to continue, the Pershing (Marshall) reforms are enacted in 1923 and the regular army is funded to the minimum that Elihu Root first proposed in 1902, this army is not going to be able to take on Bulgaria in 1930.

a. No native designed tanks.
b. No native designed tube artillery.
c. Rifle program screwed up by Douglas Macarthur.
d. Machine guns ditto.
e. Trucks and weapon carriers are WW I leftovers
f. Air service has fewer than 600 planes. Only 200 combat capable.

What is an AU inventing guy supposed to do with this RTL mess? Well, the Mr. McKinley's Navy trends offer some slight hope. Patrick J. Hurley, a sort of reformer, is the hope.^3

^3 Hurley eventually becomes Roosevelt's hatchet man, sent to do difficult, near impossible dirty jobs in places such as the China mess of 1944. This one is hard on the heels of the brilliant Japanese Ichigo Campaign that is for the Japanese, what Bagration becomes for the Russians. On the allied side, Chenault, Stilwell, and Chiang kai Chek (Chiang Chieh-shih) completely bungle the defense of Chengsha on the central Chinese plain. The Japanese do what the Germans never did during Barbarossa, the IJA recruit corvee labor, build roads and railroads, create an airbase network infrastructure and more or less create modern logistics in the middle of the Chinese wilderness. A lot of modern central China owes its economic miracle to this Japanese "imperialist infrastructure imposition" upon it. Tis certain the Chinese communists never know how to do anything with it unto the Chou reforms of 1973 and they discover this ready-made tool just sitting there to be used after a little polishing and refitting. (Sort of like the American opposite face of the coin? Ichigo was after those American B-29 bases, but also after the assembly plants and maintenance yards that go with them that the Americans build with Chinese corvee labor. The Americans are not logistically stupid, either.). Patrick Hurley in China, sees the mess that Chiang and Stillwell make of it. Cannot fire Chiang. (That assassination thing comes post-war.), so Stillwell has to go and Wedemeyer comes in. Hurley manages to muzzle Chiang, co-opts Mao, and somehow tells Wedemeyer to take over using Stillwell's plan. Chinese half of Burma 1945, and a 1945/1946 offensive is timed to go with Olympic/Coronet. Insofar as it progresses; it all works as Stillwell designs it. Hurley is smart in that regard. Get rid of Stillwell, but keep his master plan anyway. Bad news is that Truman does not trust Hurley to finish the political job Roosevelt sends him to do. A rare Truman mistake. Trusting Macarthur to do his job is another, but it is something to be addressed later. So "we" lose "China", as if we ever could hold on to an emerging nationalist movement? The point here is that Hurley is a demonstrable RTL buzzsaw, who can do amazing things at the drop of a dollar or a hat. He is perfectly able to accomplish the modest goals below, if he wants it:

a. In 1928 Rock Island Arsenal starts work on the T2 tank after the T1 tank failed. In the RTL this morphs into the M2 light tank and M1 combat car. The AU tweak is that old Patrick Hurley, after Good croaks, reverses that man's wrong penny pinching decisions (means over-ruling Douglas Macarthur, too), slashes the infantry, disbands the horse troopers, except for a ceremonial squadron, keeps the armor brigade as a going concern and develops a good tank for it.
b. Native designed artillery is there. The navy has it: 3 inch, 4 inch, 5 inch, 6 inch, 8 inch, 12 inch, even 2 and /1/4 and 1 and 1/2 inch RTL. Just design prime movers and carriages. It is what the army will do anyway in WW II. In the AU, do the same thing.
c. Rifle? Buy foreign. ZH-29. Garand and Pedersen are prima donnas. They waste enough money. The Chinese wind up buying and MAKING these weapons under license. The Holek brothers know what they are doing, even if Garand does not. Wait until d. (Old Melvin the Marine) solves the rifle problem for the army. Get a two for one with that guy.
d. The machine gun problem solves itself. Browning can turn his BAR into a gas operated belt feed machine gun as the Belgians are trying to do, or the Hotchkiss is still there. the Benet Mercie is still there, too. This can hold the line until Melvin Johnson gets going in 1939.

Anyway, the AU army is still going to be small, unready and not trained too well. BUT, within the RTL means, as given as the start assumptions, it can do the above, buy COTS fill-ins for what it does not have (modern trucks, tractors, bulldozers, etc.) and still get its job for PLAN DOG done.

Hope that MACARTHUR is not the chief of staff when it needs to go to war, though. That man is an administrative disaster, even if he is a halfway competent general. The Imperial Japanese Army and Douglas Macarthur RTL have a mixed record with each other, mostly a poor one for Douglas when Macarthur tries to take the IJA head-on. Need a better man. Brehon Burke Somervell is my AU nominee. He does good work for Roosevelt with the CCC when those 4 million WW I veterans need to be kept out of mischief.

One wondered where all the artillery and logistics support is?

FLUFF: MISTER HOOVER'S ARMY; Equipment shown

Weapon carrier: That peculiar vehicle armed with the rooftop machine gun is my rendition of a 1927 Four Wheel Drive Corporation truck adapted for military service. Believe it or not this is a real thing.



Now this is most unusual, because I find upon further research that this American company in the RTL has an interesting connection to British AEC corporation. It is not certain how much of it's technology is incorporated, but the British AEC corporation sublet FWD's all wheel drive technology and it is certain that AEC adopted it for such British military vehicles as the late 1930s Matador and the Quad artillery tractor. In the US, the FWD trucks are mostly used by mining companies and fire departments. The US military is not that interested at the time being satisfied (or cozened) to buy products from the big 4 auto-makers. Makes sense, because the trucks FWD makes are expensive and the US Army in the 1920s is not very interested in paying 3x for a FWD 1 tonne all wheel drive when it can buy a Chevy or a Ford 4x6 drive or 2x4 drive for much less.

3 tonne truck: Not too surprising, that in the 1920s, there is this Dutch company called DAF which makes its appearance. Much as the French will influence US tank designs in this AU (see below), so DAF with its famous H-drive will make its appearance. Sorry GM and Studebaker, but that is the only real game in town for this time period. The British certainly think so, (Look at their period armored cars.), so the US army might follow suit. The Dutch company in the RTL supplies kits and after Holland is invaded, the British make the components under license (Alvis I think is the manufacturer.). What American truck maker would be comparable? REO in Chicago of course (It is a small poor American army.). Maybe Studebaker will join in at some point as Plan Dog ramps up.

M1929 tank: RTL or AU, Christie will not listen to his US Army customer. Oddly enough, Walter Christie will listen to the British and the Russians, who will buy his track laying suspension and ignore his nutty ideas of what tanks should be. But this is the US Army and Christie blows it. No Sale American. Maybe Christie upset the wrong guys at Rock Island, but it is assumed in the AU that he ruins his opportunity. So what is the US army going to do?

The British Vickers 6 tonne tank is the world standard around 1930. This is a post WW I British version of the famous Renault model 1917 tank. The British tank uses a double bogey leaf spring suspension for the track layer system. The US army has looked at this solution, built a copy (T-2, tested 1926-1928), and finds out that the tank, that results, frankly is terrible. To say that the tank gives a rough unstable ride out there in the Iowa back country and the gunner is half beaten to death, is an understatement. The thing throws tracks and it tips over on the side of the hill in addition. Sure looks good, though. No sale American.

The Americans are aware of the (British 1922) Horstmann coil spring suspension system. They will RTL adapt the system in 1944 to WWII Shermans with volute springs, but note here that it is available in 1922. Volute springs as far as I can determine have a host of inventors pre WW I, but the guy I tag in the US is William Vine. He has patents for manufacture ~ 1925-31. So volute spring suspensions are a constant known feature to Rock Island engineers. They play around with the idea, and they notice what Renault is doing with their FT (US designation) which Renault has updated with Kegrasse suspension and rubber shoed two pin tracks, The US M-1 combat car and M-2 tank is the result.

From this:



That is a Yugoslav Renault FT Kegrasse.

The US army engineers develop a VVSS. I change it to a HVSS, adapt the tank hull and power train from the T-3 (with its gasoline engine crash-gear transmission, change that to a NESLCO diesel and an electric drive), and arm it with a Mr. McKinley's Navy 5 cm/50. Bingo M1929 tank. The gun motor carriage (GMC M1930) is another kit-bash of RTL components that shows up from the kludges the US army develops in 1925-1928 when they attempt to develop equipment for the experimental motorized regiment.

That is the fluff. So comments, anyone?

How about the monoplane naval fighters in your AU navy by the mid 1930s? Will they started as poor cousins of the Boeing P-26(fixed landing gear and open cockpit) or the beginnings of your versions of the Grumman Wildcat or that maligned Brewster Buffalo fighters. I know Grumman made the FF-1, F2F, F3F series for bi-planes but these aircraft belong in the late 1920s and not for the next decade where greater level speeds, faster climb rates and higher service ceilings are dominated the aerial superiority tactics that monoplanes excels. But not bi-planes who's greatest attribute was greater agility at lower speeds without stalling and that can be done by canard-winged monoplanes at greater and lower speeds.

As for your tank's 50 mm, is it similar to ballistic performance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_cm_KwK_38 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_cm_KwK_39 without the over-engineered gun breech and is the US Army consider the belief of the tank destroyer doctrine of the late 30s to early 40s as a viable strategy against enemy tanks and not the proper doctrine of the multi-role tank tactics of the post WW2 years? For HE 50 mm ammo, they should have an elongate shell for higher explosive yield insert into regular shell cartridges and training of firing them when supporting infantry or develop HEAT and/or HESH shells. Or rely on the self-propelled AFVs to do infantry support.

For next generation US tanks, they must accept a high-velocity 75 mm similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.5_cm_KwK_40 or a 76 mm variant similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76_mm_gun_M1 because the Germans use their high-velocity 75mm when they encounter the T-34s and the KV-1s and that should apply to the US Army if they encounter more heavily armoured future conflicted European tanks in 1940s and beyond. The M4 Sherman of the RTL was an adequate tank for late 1930s but they nerf the 75 mm gun for infantry support and could attack only tanks like the Panzer MK. 3 and MK. 4 equivalents.

As for machine guns, the Browning Model 1917 will be made because the US military didn't like the Vicker Maxim variant and used them as substitute to supplant the existing US Maxim model stockpile and return them or scrapped them when WW1 ended. As for the .50 Browning HMG, it maybe created or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotchkiss ... achine_gun wins the design contest and for LMGs or the real GPMGs, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotchkiss ... achine_gun with a proper metallic strip ammo belt feed system or an AU BAR design.